


The Muted Colour of Wine

by barium



Category: South Park
Genre: Demon AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-31
Updated: 2018-01-31
Packaged: 2019-03-12 00:20:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13535661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/barium/pseuds/barium
Summary: You meet Kyle on a cold day.





	The Muted Colour of Wine

**Author's Note:**

> a short thing idk take it

“What are you doing here?”

These are his first words to you, uttered harshly despite the dried tears on his cheeks and the hunched shape to his body. He’s on the bench in front of Stark’s Pond when you find him. It’s cold out, you can tell, because there’s snow along the embankment and the boy is dressed in a heavy orange coat, his bright red hair poking messily from his hat. It’s a colour you’re sure you’ve never seen before. He continues to stare at you, waiting for your answer.

“You called for me,” you say, defensive. To your understanding it’s true. You don’t get a lot of time up here, on this plane, only when doing boring chores for Satan, which is why it surprised you to hear the crying. You heard it as if you were at the very bottom of the pond, and you listened. He never called for your name, specifically. But it felt like a calling for you.

It makes no sense. You aren’t an angel, and something like this doesn’t happen to demons. To you. No one even knows you’re here.

He says, “No, I didn’t,” of course.

“Well, I heard you,” you say. You walk up to him and sit on the bench too. Far enough away so as not to touch him. You don’t know what would happen if you did. Before today, you’d never talked to a mortal before. “So you might as well just tell me what you want from me.”

He narrows his eyes at you, like you’d just insulted him. The juxtaposition of the annoyance in his expression and the poorly hidden sadness, hastily shelved away to be dealt with another time, makes you think maybe you might do whatever he asks you to. Because he has to want something from you. When you give no reaction to his look he scoffs and looks down to his arms, which are crossed over his pulled-up knees. “Just go away.”

You shake your head. “I can’t,” you say, though you could. “My name is Stan,” you offer by way of introduction. He says nothing, and in the moments passing you try to guess how old he is. He looks like he could be the same age as you. You age like any normal human would, though Satan says you’ll stop sometime around thirty and stay there forever. It seems so far away that you never bother thinking about it. “How old are you?” You’re trying to get him to speak to you.

“Eight,” he says. He glances at you and accidentally catches your eye. His own go wide, and he sits up straighter. “Your eyes are red?”

You blink rapidly. You were taught to school them to a neutral brown colour, but it’s hard to focus on that. At least your wings and horns are still hidden. Your eyes should be brown again, and Kyle is looking at you like you’re amazing. You’re not supposed to show yourself to humans, but getting him to look at you like that feels like a bigger accomplishment than anything else.

“What are you?” he asks.

“If I tell you, will you tell me why you were crying?”

“Maybe.”

You frown. “Will you tell me your name, at least?”

He drops one of his knees and nods.

“I’m a demon,” you tell him. “I live in Hell.”

He narrows his eyes again, skeptical. “Nuh-uh.”

“I’m serious.”

He lifts his chin. “Prove it.”

You try to consider the consequences, but you’re a demon, so you must be pretty much invincible anyway. You let go of the effort of concealing yourself, and it feels like a huge weight being lifted from your shoulders. You know what you look like: your horns are slight and stick out on your head, a dark red colour above dark hair, and your wings are black and not very big yet either, sticking out kind of awkwardly from your back. Your eyes are a loud crimson.

The boy’s own travel all over you, from your head down to your feet, even though there’s nothing different there. He meets your eyes and says, almost breathlessly, “My name is Kyle.”

You smile, feeling victorious. “Hi, Kyle.”

“Hi, Stan.” He leans in closer to you. He’s studying your eyes so intensely you almost blush, or throw up. He says, “Dude.”

“What?”

He shakes his head. “And you have wings?”

“Yeah.” You twist a bit, allowing him to see. “They’re not done growing yet. But they’ll get big soon, and then I’ll be able to fly.”

His eyes go wider somehow. The dried tears on his face seem ridiculous now. Not thinking, you reach up to swipe their evidence from his face.

“Oh, that,” he says, unbothered by it. “It was nothing, really. Just kids at school.”

“They bother you?” you ask.

“A little,” he tells you. “I just don’t care about what everyone else is doing. You know? I want to be myself.”

“You should be.” You give him a genuine smile. “You’re great.”

“You don’t even know me.”

“I plan to,” you say. You’ve been gone for too long now, people will be wondering where you’ve gone off to. “I have to go soon, but—whenever you want to see me, you can just call me.” You have no idea how he summoned you the first time, but you know the reliable way of doing it. “Here.” You reach for his hand and single out a digit. To you, his skin feels dangerously cold. “Just prick your finger and ask for Stan when it drips.”

“Ask who?” he says, very seriously. He’s listening to you intently, and you enjoy the feeling.

“Satan,” you say in a scary voice, but he only scoffs again, like it’s another joke.

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.” You stand from the bench. “Bye, Kyle.”

He’s cradling his hand, as if to remember the way you held it. “Bye Stan.”

You vanish in a wisp or air and sulfur.

 

 

As the both of you age, you slowly come to realize that you love him.

It’s not long before you get permission from Satan to spend time up there. He’s always been a pretty cool dude, lax if nothing else. You consider him to be something like a father figure, which you think gives him a soft spot for you over the other demons.

“You’re a smart kid,” he says to you. “As long as you follow the rules, I don’t care.”

The rules were few in number and easy to remember. Don’t show your true self, don’t validate any religion over another, and don’t fall in love. You knew from talking to others that the last one was really more like _don’t fuck women_ , but Satan softened the meaning for your ears. You didn’t want to fuck women anyway. You just wanted to hang out with Kyle.

He’s ecstatic to see you every time you show up. You appear and his nervous eyes brighten, knife in hand and blood on the floor. He’s always messy about summoning you, so you have to teach him how to more efficiently. He’s gotten good at cleaning up blood stains a few years in, though he mostly summons you from outside anyway. In his backyard in the dark, or out by Stark’s Pond and sometimes even beyond, in the middle of the forest.

He’s fascinated with your body. As you age, your wings grow the fastest. Your horns start to bend backward into a sharp point. You catch him staring at your eyes a lot, and he loves feeling the texture of your wings. During the winters, when he was _really_ cold and he touched you, he’d gasp from the difference.

“So you’re not cold at all?” he’d ask you. You were always laden in nothing more than pants.

You’d shake your head. “I’m always warm.”

After that, he summons you at night in his room. He dismisses the blood in his carpet and asks you to sleep in his bed with him, because he’s freezing. You don’t argue that touching him is akin to hugging an ice cube and not super comfortable for you, because even despite that you like touching him. Knowing it’s against the rules only makes it better, even if you don’t sleep.

He introduces you to everyone. Apparently he talks about you all the time, though of course he doesn’t mention the demon part. His friends effortlessly become yours, as if you went to school with them all along, as if you were meant to be there. He seems enamored with this human version of you as well: your brown eyes, your normal hair. He buys you a hat and a coat with his allowance money to help you blend in, and the gesture touches you so much that you promise you’ll make it up to him someday. No one had ever given you a gift before.

At thirteen, the both of you are going through very different puberties. He has skin a bit more oily, and sometimes you catch him giving you weird looks that you don’t know how to read because he’s never given them before. He’s grown so much that he’s practically your height. He has more hair on his body, which tickles you whenever you sleep together.

You feel you’re worse. You’re prone to mood swings, and doing violent things during blackouts. You’re natural eye colour has darkened a little with time, though they go bright red again when you’re feeling upset, which is more and more often. Kyle had always been good at calming you down, but it hardly seems to work anymore. If you feel yourself close to snapping, you excuse yourself to Hell. You know it upsets him when you do, but you don’t know how to tell him that you’re scared of yourself.

Satan seems amused that you’re worried. “It’s just puberty, kid. Have you killed anyone yet?”

“No!” you say. “And I won’t! I’m not a murderer.”

“You’re a demon.” He crosses his arms. He’s comically large in size compared to you, extremely muscular and always shirtless, which wasn’t uncommon among your type. You feel starkly different from the rest in your coat and hat, and you don’t mind the difference at all. “I hate to break this to you, but killing is in your nature. It’s only going to get worse. Hey, how’s that Broflovski kid?”

You frown, but you’re not surprised. You’ve never personally mentioned Kyle to him before, but Kyle’s voice is the one he hears all the time. “He’s fine,” you tell him. “We’re friends.”

“Careful with that word.” He points upward. “Me and God were friends once.”

“I’m going,” you say angrily and turn to leave. You can’t leave Hell without a summoning, but you don’t want to talk to him any longer.

“Follow the rules!” he calls after you in a sing-song voice, like he knows you haven’t and he doesn’t care either.

In the days following, you kill a dog.

You blackout, the low burn of anger boiling over and possessing you. You come to with your hands roaming the inside of the poor thing, poised to eat. You came to because you’d heard Kyle shout your name.

You turn, and he’s staring at you, horrified. After realizing what you’d done, you’re positive you look more so. For the first time in your life, you start to cry.

“Oh, Stan, shh.” He helps you up by your arms, avoiding the copious amount of blood all over your hands and your front, and starts to lead you home. You’re in the woods somewhere. He must have followed you. “That was my neighbor’s dog, but—it doesn’t matter. It’ll be okay.”

You shake your head violently. “It won’t.”

“We’re going to clean you up,” he says. “And then you can sleep with me.”

“I can’t sleep.” You know you sound pathetic. You weren’t in the mood to lie with Kyle in your arms for hours on end, thinking endlessly about the dog. The memories of killing it came to you in snapshots. The noises it made, the sound of ripping it open. Deep down, you took pleasure in it, and that only made you more upset.

“We can stay up.”

“No.” You wrench yourself from him. “I don’t belong here, up here. I never did. I’m going home.”

“Stan.” He reaches for you, but you pull away. “Don’t leave me alone,” he begs. He sounds scared, like you’ll disappear and stay gone forever.

If you could do that, you would. But you know you won’t. “Just for tonight,” you reassure him.

And you leave.

 

 

At sixteen, you kiss him. It’s the two of you alone in his bedroom, the door locked with his family somewhere on the other side. His skin is not so especially cold today, and he keeps stealing looks at you. You’ve been around humans for a long time now, and you’ve done a lot of reading and research, watched plenty of movies. You know what the looks mean, even if he doesn’t. So while he’s talking about something or other—complaining, probably, he loves to do that—you say, “Kyle.”

“What?”

You bring your lips together. He’s surprised but he melts into it, opens his mouth to you, and it feels like something that’s supposed to happen, that’s happened in every universe up to and after this one. You bite his lip and he shivers.

“What was that for?” He speaks against your lips, as if the kiss is over.

“I’ve always wanted to do that,” you say honestly. You think back to when you first met him, how you would’ve done anything he asked of you. You were too young to think of it, but you would’ve kissed him then too.

“Me too.” He brings his arms up to your waist and pulls you closer. “Do it again.”

The nature of your relationship thereafter is heady, his body on yours in ways you never knew you wanted and he seemed to have mastered. The first time your dick touched his thought you might cry. He loved you in your natural form, was all over you behind closed doors and by the pond. It seemed effortless, to be with him in this way. It was a poorly kept secret that you kept anyway.

At twenty, out of high school, he goes to university out of state, in a California city you can’t keep track of. He’s riding on a full scholarship and working as a budget analyst. You’re not at all sure what that entails, but he comes home to his—your—shitty apartment with complaints on his lips and an almost equal desire to blow you.

Time is spiraling, out of your hands. Your eyes are the muted colour of wine.

He still loves them. He stares all the time. It’s only when he asks the question that you realize you don’t know.

“Why do your eyes keep getting darker?”

In the moment, you be honest and tell him you have no idea. Later, when you see Satan again, you take it upon yourself to ask. He’s busy, in the middle of something. With one backwards glance at you he says, “So you still haven’t killed anyone at all?”

“No,” you tell him.

“That’s why.”

“What?”

“Demons that mature without killing either do so with or without my permission,” he explains, like you should know this already. “If they’re defying orders, they cease to exist at all under my command. Alternatively, they can be human.”

Your eyes light up. “Are you serious?”

“Stan.” He turns to you. “You know I’ve got a lot of soft spots, and you know you’re one of them. I’m aware you love this kid.”

 _He’s not a kid_ , you want to argue. Kyle is twenty now, you both are. You don’t say anything.

“All red eyes revert to brown when the change is made,” he goes on. “That’s why your eyes are dark. They’ll only get darker.”

“I want to be human,” you tell him.

He waves his hand dismissively. “So be human.”

You smile at him. You have no idea what time it is, but Kyle should summon you soon. If you simply stayed, it would happen. Eventually you’ll just lose the ability to fly, and to show your horns. To come back here. You turn to Satan. “Will I see you again?”

He laughs. “Humans die. And you don’t think I’m gonna let God take you from me, do you?”

Grinning, you hug him. “Thank you.” You say the words quietly, but continuously. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

You don’t tell Kyle. He’ll figure it out when you never leave him again. When he finally summons you, you kiss him like it’s your last chance.

But of course, you have forever.


End file.
